Of course mutilating the foreskin of the penis of a baby boy is neither savage nor butchering. Infant genital flesh is remarkably different depending on the depth of religious conviction and fanaticism of the parents. Did it ever occur to you that mutilating the genitals of all newborn infants is wrong?

Did it ever occur to you that you speak on what you do not understand or know?

To compare the removal of a small portion of the foreskin to the removal of a teenage woman's clit shows the depth of you lack of understanding.

Did you ever read the positive science about infant male circumcision when this medical procedure is done in the strict JEWISH method?

Reduction of infection, improved hygiene and now it's been proven that it reduces the transmission os std's including aids/hiv.

Of course those that do not do the procedure the way the Jews do it, do it with higher risks as their lack of historic knowledge and technic produces greater instances of medical mistakes.

Now FGM is in a class all it's own, with the practice of using razor blades, stitching up the vaginal opening except for a small hole for urinating and the removal of the active sex organ, and doing this with 10-25 year old girls/women.

To even put them in the same sentence shows your lack on perspective except for you to attempt to somehow paint anything Jewish as savage. You have failed again.

American government is now in the redistribution and welfare-provision business, and this is not (contrary to appearances) at variance with the founding fathers’ conception of a nation that is inherently opposed to state interference and domination over the individual. This is the new credo of American nationhood: the government, not the community or the household, will be the moral arbiter of social virtue. The traditional suspicion of the overweening power of the state is now a thing of the past. Democracy is about electing a government that will be there to protect you from hardship, shelter you from the storm and absolve you from sin. Well, no, maybe not that last one – but the concept of the state as moral saviour is not so remote from this, is it?

"American government is now in the redistribution and welfare-provision business, and this is not (contrary to appearances) at variance with the founding fathers’ conception of a nation that is inherently opposed to state interference and domination over the individual. This is the new credo of American nationhood: the government, not the community or the household, will be the moral arbiter of social virtue. The traditional suspicion of the overweening power of the state is now a thing of the past. Democracy is about electing a government that will be there to protect you from hardship, shelter you from the storm and absolve you from sin. Well, no, maybe not that last one – but the concept of the state as moral saviour is not so remote from this, is it?"

I'm moving more and more towards rat's position of 'do away with the FED'; however, the problem I see with that given the interdependance of the world finacial systems is that there is no viable alternative.

I still contend the main problem is not so much the idea of the central bank but rather the people running it and the policies they have introduced. We think of both Bush and Obama as using the crisis of 2001 and 2008 to expand their powers at the expense of the common Joe. However, since 2008, the FED, under Benanke, has done exactly the same thing.

The FED is a construct of Congress. At a minimum, there should be regular audits of the FED and whatever changes are required to assure transparancy should be made.

The last (only?) audit of the FED turned up $7.7 trillion dollars the FED had secretly disbursed.

People claim the FED should be independant and free from political interference. Those who believe it is are naive.

As currently run, it is merely a honey pot for the big banks. Bernanke has indicated he will do whatever it takes to protect the banks; unemployment, growth and likely interest rates be damned.

As for politics, the president elects seven of the 12 members of the Board of Governors including the chairman and the vice-chairman. The Governor of the New York Federal Reserve is a permanent member with the other four voting members rotating among the other Fed Governors. So like it or not, it is political.

Congress created the FED, they have the obligation to monitor it. The list of what some would term overreach (I would call them abuses) by the FED over the last few years is extensive. There needs to be more transparency. I'm sick of hearing "We can only effectively do our job in private away from public and political pressure." Where is Anonymous when you need it?

At a minimum, Congress ought to clearly define the FED's mandate. It started out with a mandate to keep prices stable. That was expanded by Congress to also include controlling unemployment. Now the FED over the past few years, using the financial crisis as an excuse, has on their own expanded their mandate even further. Now they believe they are responsible for things like boosting the stock market. And they want it all done in secret.

We need regular audits at a minimum. I also see no harm in having a full time ombudsman, or auditor general who could report to Congress when it appeared the FED was veering away from its official mandate.

The guy in the tape did a decent although superficial job in pointing out the problems with the FED. His solution on the other hand, private ownership and laissez faire business practices, is nutz. By private ownership I am assuming he means the big banks would run it with little or no oversite. The numerous financial crisis we have suffered over the last few decades including the big one in 2008 should be proof that the banks lack the intelligence and/or integrity to run the system unsupervised and uncontrolled.

Our USA tax dollars PAY for the programing both in the UNRWA and with direct aid to teach the idiot palestinian children to hate and want to murder Jews.

Some rouge israeli at a check point is hardly institutional, it aint policy and what the previous asinine thread did not report was the fact the the IDF DOES prosecute and does not encourage un-professional behavior.

In America, the slaughter at Wounded Knee was institutional, as were the Jim Crow laws.

The massacre at My Lai was not "institutional"

Arafat himself ordered one to two jewish women a week to be stabbed to death, stating that if they used )paelstinians) knives the international community would not allow the Israelis to crack down.

The institutional racism that is educated in the arab world (and Islamic) to hate jews is pure and simple dehumanizing.

While I won't argue that the Arabs don't have institutional problems the numerous Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank are hardly benign outposts limiting travel at Israeli borders. As you know the Israeli State also has some institutional practises that don't work out in the Israeli Arabic populations favor - the housing stuff being one such item.

"The result of 30 years of illegal immigration, the reigning culture of the coastal childless households, the exodus of the overtaxed, and the rule of public employees is not just Democratic, but hyper-liberal supermajorities in the legislature. In the most naturally wealthy state in the union with a rich endowment from prior generations, California is serially broke — the master now of its own fate. It has the highest menu of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation, and about the worst infrastructure, business climate, and public education. Is the latter fact despite or because of the former?

How, then, does California continue? Read on, but in a nutshell, natural and inherited wealth are so great on the coast that a destructive state government must work overtime to ruin what others wrought.

Also, when you say, “My God, one of every three welfare recipients lives in California,” or “California schools are terrible,” you mean really, “Not in Newport or Carmel. So who cares about Fresno, or Tulare — they might as well be in Alabama for all the times I have been there.”"

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Miss ol Ruf to tell us that California is just fine.'Rat will come along soon and tell us were Americanizing Mexico w/our embrace of illegals via the Welfare State.

The military costs of empire and growing civil service bloated the state; forcing Roman emperors to find new sources of tax revenues. They did this by taxing the wealthy and by looting the temples to pagan gods, thereby encouraging the rise of Christianity in the process since it delegitimized the old temples.

But all did not go well. An attempt to return to the gold standard created a two-tier monetary system throughout the empire. Taxes were paid in gold but business was conducted on other terms. Eventually people had to buy “real money” with other money. As a result people began to work for the government.

Now, what were the consequences of inflation? One of the odd things about inflation is, in the Roman Empire, that while the state survived — the Roman state was not destroyed by inflation — what was destroyed by inflation was the freedom of the Roman people. Particularly, the first victim was their economic freedom.

Early this morning Fatso took a most magnificent tumble. As per his usual practice he had jumped up to the top of the two stacked file boxes, and then leaped for the window sill, bypassing the intermediate stage of the lamp desk, thinking to head outside through the slightly open window.

Losing his footing on the sill, he tumbled in three stages down, to lamp desk, to file boxes, to floor, crashing into a fan on the way down.

Poets may come and go, variously loved and hated, but cats remain loveable throughout --

Sonnet to a Cat

Cat! who hast pass'd thy grand cliacteric,How many mice and rats hast in thy daysDestroy'd? - How many tit bits stolen? GazeWith those bright languid segments green, and prickThose velvet ears - but pr'ythee do not stickThy latent talons in me - and upraiseThy gentle mew - and tell me all thy fraysOf fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -For all the wheezy asthma, - and for allThy tail's tip is nick'd off - and though the fistsOf many a maid have given thee many a mail,Still is that fur as soft as when the listsIn youth thou enter'dst on glass bottled wall.

"To save time and cost Lockheed Martin's proposal envisaged using only the AN/AAQ-14 targeting pod (LTP) with modifications including GPS, ballistic tables and navigation aids. The pod is not integrated into the F-14's computer's and software, instead it feeds images from the FLIR onto the RIO's PTID and the pilot's vertical display indicator (VDI) in the F-14A/B or one of the two MFD's in the F-14D. LANTIRN, as installed on the F-15E and F-16C, can fly the aircraft in terrain following mode to a pre-set target. The F-14 version cannot do this, however as the LTP includes GPS receivers the pod can aid navigation, providing a highly accurate means by which to check the aircraft's INS system."

Fatso is his own owner. And owns us. And seems loyal only to himself. A stray, he took over the whole house, stage by stage, room by room. I really have gotten to like him. Like me, he hardly ever actually does anything.

I don’t think we are seeing Don Rumsfeld’s Light Footprint strategy. I think it is John Kerry’s “Ballerina Standing on her Tip Toes attempting a Pirouette Strategy.”

The ballerina is not exactly light and nimbe — she’s more like Hillary or maybe John Kerry in drag — but you could still knock her/him over with a feather (if by taking a fall they can avoid the blame). Of course attacking with feathers would not be nice, as members of Congress showed us last week.

Leading from Behind in Ballet Slippers, as a strategy, counts on the kindness of strangers — and foreign enemies — which taken together is worth ten divisions and any number of F-22s. Reset! Reset! Good thing most of the media knows about the Responsibility to Protect Obama’s Butt.

Unrest in Egypt seems to be spreading. Folks marching at night, defying curfew. If the military remains with Morsi they can use those 200 new American tanks to blast the protesters to smithereens. Arab Spring, Barky style.

"Central banks have become the primary purchasers of new national government debt. The private sector is no longer gobbling up all the debt which the government sector produces. The national governments are dependent upon their central banks to buy their IOUs with newly counterfeited money. The central banks now serve as lenders of last resort. This was always the official justification for central banking. This was the story which the central bankers gave to the national governments. Of course, the real purpose of central banks is to protect the largest commercial banks. It is the enforcing arm of the banking cartel. But that was never what the promoters of central banks told the politicians who were asked to vote for the creation of a central bank monopoly in each country."

Speaking to the Observer in 2011 after his record-setting 90ft ride, McNamara explained: "We'd been invited by the government of Portugal to Nazaré to investigate it for a big wave competition. There is an underwater canyon 1,000ft deep that runs from the ocean right up to the cliffs. It's like a funnel. At its ocean end it's three miles wide but narrows as it gets closer to the shore and when there is a big swell it acts like an amplifier.

Now a pair of archeologists are upending that widely accepted narrative with a new one. Citing a series of puzzling finds along the East Coast — finely wrought stone tools made thousands of years before the land-bridge migration — they suggest that the New World’s discoverers may have come not from Asia, but from Europe. Some 20,000 years ago, a Stone Age people known as the Solutreans lived in the lands of today’s Spain and France, and their tools bear striking similarities to the ones being found on the East Coast.

........

The only real consensus among archaeologists is that everyone in America came from "someplace else." Or as the Bill Murray character memorably said in Stripes, "We're Americans, with a capital 'A', huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world."

The Army has stopped serving cooked breakfasts to some of the U.S. soldiersin Afghanistan as part of its drawdown, a move that prompted troops to writehome asking their families and friends to send care packages with cereal,breakfast bars and other foods.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.